Crime doesn't pay, but there is payback

Page Tools

Related

Those who knew him reckon Terrence Bernard Hodson was a classic old-style crook. A polite, friendly, even charming, rogue who, according to one, would have made a nice neighbour.

Hodson had a cabinet of convictions - many for drug offences - over his 56 years and he'd done plenty of time in jail, being of the school that "if you do the crime you do the time". But at the weekend in his house in East Kew, his time was cut short. He was found killed, with his wife Christine, in their loungeroom.

The double slaying has provoked even more chilling fears than some of the dozens of Melbourne's underworld hits because Hodson was a major police witness.

In December he had been charged with Paul Dale and David Miechel, two now-suspended detectives from the major drug investigation division, with drug trafficking offences.

And his wife was hardly a major player in her husband's murky world. She, like her husband, was English-born and is remembered as a well-presented, polite and even meek woman. Being there was perhaps the only reason she was killed.

AdvertisementAdvertisement

But once Hodson agreed to help Ceja, investigating police and drugs, the word was out. Hodson was "hot" - a target marked for silencing - and he knew it.

A colourful past had caught up with him. In the 1980s, Hodson was one of a number charged after they drove, heavily armed, from Melbourne to the Adelaide Hills to steal a marijuana crop. One co-offender was Nikolai "the Bulgarian" Radev, another gangland victim.

One of Hodson's daughters is married to Peter Reid, a convicted police killer who once tried to blackmail the family of missing Melbourne schoolgirl Karmein Chan. Hodson would have nothing to do with him. Another daughter is alleged to have had a relationship with Miechel.